Abstract
X-ray pulsar-based navigation (XNAV) is a promising autonomous navigation method, and the pulse phase is the basic measurement of XNAV. However, the current methods for estimating the pulse phase for orbiting spacecraft have a high computational cost. This paper proposes a stellar angle measurement-aided pulse phase estimation method for high Earth orbit (HEO) spacecraft, with the aim of reducing the computational cost of pulse phase estimation in XNAV. In this pulse phase estimation method, the effect caused by the orbital motion of the spacecraft is roughly removed by stellar angle measurement. Furthermore, a deeply integrated navigation method using the X-ray pulsar and the stellar angle is proposed. The performances of the stellar angle measurement-aided pulse phase estimation method and the integrated navigation method were verified by simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed pulse phase estimation method can handle the signals of millisecond pulsars and achieve pulse phase estimation with lower computational cost than the current methods. In addition, for HEO spacecraft, the position error of the proposed integrated navigation method is lower than that of the stellar angle navigation method.
Highlights
Due to the significant increase in the number of spacecraft in recent years, the burden of ground-based tracking systems has increased, reducing the survivability of spacecraft [1]
A stellar angle measurement-aided pulse phase estimation method is proposed that can significantly reduce the computational cost of the estimation of the pulse phase
In this pulse phase estimation method, the time-varying Doppler frequency caused by orbital motion is roughly removed by introducing stellar angle measurement into the pulse phase estimation
Summary
Due to the significant increase in the number of spacecraft in recent years, the burden of ground-based tracking systems has increased, reducing the survivability of spacecraft [1]. TOAs. For a spacecraft that is stationary or performs a uniform linear motion towards the pulsar, two types of methods are effective for estimating the pulse TOA, namely, the epoch folding method [16] and the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) method [17]. A phase tracking algorithm was proposed by Golshan and Sheikh [22] This method divides the pulsar observation period into several intervals within each of which the spacecraft can be assumed to perform a linear uniform motion. We proposed a deeply integrated navigation method using the X-ray pulsar and stellar angle for high-Earth orbit (HEO) spacecraft. Compared with the current method for estimating the pulse TOA for orbiting spacecraft, the proposed method can greatly reduce the computational burden.
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